Whiteboard Friday - Building a Personal&nbspBrand

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

This week Rand discusses the topic of Personal Branding. What are the pros and cons of having a personal brand for yourself or within your company? How can you build a personal brand, and what benefits personal branding can have above and beyond corporate branding. Enjoy!

In my industry there is a decent amount of organic personal branding and last year we ran head first into one of the cons you mentioned...the person was replaced. When a person leaves, or the decision is made to replace them as the headliner, be ready for some potentially rough seas.

In preparation for the move, we successfully initiated efforts to reinforce the corporate brand in order to hedge the impact of those who followed the personal brand of the person who left.

I am interested to hear how other companies have dealt with one brand leaving and a new one taking the spotlight. How did you leverage the scenario to maintain/improve customer retention in the following months?

Conversely, this can be a very tricky proposition since the brand relies on the image of the individual, which is much more difficult to recover from in a time of crisis. The only successful ones that comes to mind are Martha Stewart/Omnimedia who recovered quite well from Martha's stock market debacle, and Donald Trump who recovered from near bankruptcy.

One thing I think is important to consider for both bloggers and small businesses, is that if you ever intend to sell your company, you are much better off having a non-personal name for it. It's been my experience that generally speaking - a generic company name is going to garner a greater sell price than one based on your name. Plus - who wants to sell their name to a stranger?

The only successful ones that comes to mind are Martha Stewart/Omnimedia who recovered quite well from Martha's stock market debacle, and Donald Trump who recovered from near bankruptcy.

How about every politician who ever put their foot in their mouth and then came back to win? I agree with you Sean, personal branding is very scalable, and the list is almost endless.

if you ever intend to sell your company, you are much better off having a non-personal name for it. It's been my experience that generally speaking - a generic company name is going to garner a greater sell price than one based on your name.

The corollary to that is that if you are employed by a prominent company, personal branding gives you a chance when you exit to take something with you other than your severance pay.

Sean - but with all of those personal brands, that figure at the head of the company must do an incredibly significant percentage of the work (or at least publicity). They're also exceptions in my mind, and not examples of the fact that personal brands are scalable. Of the tens of thousands of very successful organizations, I'd venture a guess that a mere handful are the result of a scaled-up personal brand.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but aren't there tens of thousands of successful leaders running the tens of thousands of successful organizations?

I guess my question is: How scalable does personal brand really have to be before it's extremely successful? I'd say not very.

It could be as simple as getting a raise and a promotion or a new job somewhere else. There are rewards for being well-known and liked even if it's just to a handful of people who are going to make it worth your while.

It happens all the time that people move to a new job and take customers and staff along with them. Isn't that ability part of personal branding? (The answer could very well be no, but I'd appreciate learning more about the distinction :)

I think we might be talking about two different things. I was referring to personal brands that have become corporate brands, which is what Sean and I were discussing (like Oprah or Donald Trump) vs. large brands that simply have strong personal brands within them (Microsoft and Ballmer or FastCompany and Scoble).

1) identifying goals of personal branding (i.e. attention)
2) identifying investment costs
3) making sure you have the right person to be "branded"

i'd also suggest another point:

4) determine if what, if any, the ROI is on developing a personal brand

this kind of calculation will of course be somewhat "soft" and qualitative, but it's still worthwhile to think about. so often, goal #1 becomes an end in itself. i.e. "i'm getting attention and i like attention, so i'll spend time and energy to get more."

in some cases, time can be better spent building up a track record of quantifiable success, which accomplishes many of the goals rand identified in the "PROs" section, i.e. trustworthiness, ability to transition, etc.

Hey Guys, great whiteboard session...being an SEOMoz newbie, I must say I like the whiteboard Friday idea!! As for the content, well not bad, but a little high level (tough subject I know!) I would like to have seen a little more about WHY a personal brand? No-one seems to be talking much about the REAL benefits of a powerful personal brand (positive or negative). The thing is, personal branding is not optional - everyone has one. When prospects or colleagues or management hear your name, what do they think? So, would be good to add a little footnote on WHY - along the lines of 'helps you articulate clearly your point of difference and why peope should do business with you' or differentiates you in the marketplace as an expert or authority on a subject - and as the person everyone should be talking to about this particular subject i.e. you will SELL more' and the final benefit of course is that people rarely buy product or service, they buy you..and having a pwerful personal brand means they are more clear on what they get when they buy you! Keep up the good work...hope to see more on the subject!!

I think you should always pay attention to personal branding. At the very least, you want to make yourself easier to be found via Search. It is almost like the way people used to call and check references. Nowadays, you get Googled.

Aaaahhh I love Whiteboard Friday! Sorry, I had to get that out. But I do.

Also, is it just me or is everything about Jane recently :-P? I mean, don't get me wrong, Jane. You're cool and funny and pretty and all of that, but they're now resorting to cut and paste headshots to get you worked into the video somehow.

Great video Rand. Companies should recognize that positive personal brands only reflect in a positive way on the company. They should be encouraging employees to develop their personal brands for that reason alone (but there are others). Sure, the person leaving is a risk to the company but if the person isn't happy they'll eventually leave anyway. And if the employee gets a better offer it's up to the company to decide how much that talent is worth to keep them - and whether they are replacable. Here's a tip though - don't wait until the employee has another offer to evaluate their worth. Loyalty speaks volumes and I'd bemuch less likely to leave a company that expressed their loyalty to me before I had another offer on the table.

Very interesting. I've actually been looking at getting several people involved with personal branding through blogging and online participation where I work. The only thing that has stopped me so far is the amount of work it would be for me. Since they would be more computer/seo illiterate I'd have to set everything up for each person.